1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to systems and methods for reducing print defects in electrostatically formed images.
2. Description of Related Art
The electrophotographic printing process is well known. Typically, electrostatic imaging and printing processes include several distinct stages. These stages typically include some or all of (1) charging, (2) exposing, (3) developing, (4) transferring, (5) fusing, and (6) cleaning. An electrophotographic printing system typically includes a printer or a marking engine. The printer or marking engine may include a photoconductive belt or drum as a photoconductive surface.
In the charging stage, a uniform electrical charge is uniformly deposited on the surface of the photoconductive belt or drum to electrostatically sensitize the photoconductive surface. The electrophotographic exposing stage includes rotating or moving the charged photoconductive surface to an exposure station, where the charged portion of the photoconductive surface is exposed to light from, for example, a scanning laser beam. By modulating the light beam, an electrostatic latent image of variable electrostatic potential is recorded on the photoconductive surface. The light beam is modulated with an input serial image information stream so that individual picture elements or pixels of the image represented by the data stream are exposed on the photoreceptor to form the latent image.
The electrophotographic developing stage uses a developer material, such as a toner powder, which is attracted to the latent image in varying densities depending varying electrostatic potential of the latent image. In the transferring and fusing stages, the toner powder image is transferred to a copy sheet, and finally the toner powder image is heated and/or pressed to permanently fuse the powder image to the copy sheet in the image configuration. In the electrophotographic cleaning stage, the photoconductive surface of toner is cleaned and the charge images are discharged so that the process can be reliably repeated.